Tales from the Script: Director Peter Hanson

Dozens of acclaimed Hollywood screenwriters get the last word in the documentary, Tales from the Script, which is currently in limited release.

Curiously the Netflix average rating for the movie is a measley 2.3 stars (out of 5), while the IMDB rating is a stellar 9.3 (out of 10).

I don’t know what that means, but with interviews from John August, Frank Darabont, Shane Black, David Hayter, William Goldman, and many other amazing scribes, it’s on my must-see list.

The film’s director, Peter Hanson, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. I found some of his comments, refreshingly bleak. 🙂

Here are a couple excerpts from the article:

Writer/director Peter Hanson jokes that his documentary Tales from the Script is a “scientific study of the life cycle of a screenwriter, from stupor to carcass.” But there’s a ring of truth to his words. In Hollywood, it’s presumed that set designers know more about set design than anyone else on a film production, and a boom operator is the boom expert. But when it comes to a film’s script, everyone feels they’re as capable of shaping the story as the writer.

…

Hanson — an author and struggling screenwriter himself (he’s never sold a full-length narrative script) — said he wanted to give would-be writers a reality check about how films got made in Tinseltown. “I have seen too many friends flame out because they discovered the disappointments of this career in the course of trying to pursue it,” Hanson said. “As Paul Schrader says in the film, if you can’t be happy doing anything else but film, then it’s the right career for you. But if you could be happy doing something else…then why not be happy?”